Monks bemoan female entry

The Greek monastic community of Mount Athos has condemned a female left-wing lawmaker who flouted its 1,000-year-old entry ban on women, her political party said.

In a letter to the Syriza party, the monks complained that deputy Evangelia Amanatidou-Paschalidou and six other women had "provocatively violated the avaton", the 1045 AD decree that forbids women access on grounds of impurity.

Paschalidou was part of a January 8 protest by around 500 women and men from villages in the Halkidiki peninsula in northern Greece who marched on the enclave to object to the monks’ alleged encroachment on public land.

The demonstrators belong to a local community group locked in a court dispute with five of the monasteries over ownership of some 8,300 hectares of forest and land which they say belongs to their villages.

The six female demonstrators who briefly crossed the self-governing community’s borders could be charged with a misdemeanour for breaking the medieval ban and theoretically face sentences of two to 12 months in prison.

No woman had been known to set foot at Mount Athos, which is considered one of Orthodox Christianity’s holiest sites, since the 1045 decree was enacted during the Byzantine Empire era.

Efforts to lift the ban - most recently by the European Union in 2002 and 2003 - have fallen on deaf ears.

Successive Greek governments have not dared to press the issue with the influential Greek Orthodox Church, which is constitutionally part of the state.

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